The addition of realistic lighting and shadows to virtual environments, such as a virtual video game environment, may be computationally expensive. As such, rendering times for lighting effects may be unacceptably long for use during video game play. For example, the creation of texture maps that encode realistic lighting (e.g. global illumination) and shadows (“light maps”) on a virtual environment may take hours, or even days, to compute. Thus, such lighting effects are generally pre-computed for a virtual environment during development of the virtual environment, rather than being calculated in real-time during game play.
Dynamic lighting and shadowing may be computed more quickly. However, the visual quality of dynamic lighting may be much lower than that of pre-computed lighting effects. Further, dynamic lighting may utilize significant resources at run-time.